When he is not writing fiction, Steven Amsterdam is a palliative care nurse in Melbourne. In the afterword to his third novel, he relates how he has been asked on occasion whether he can’t “speed things up”, on the basis that “you wouldn’t treat a dog like this”. The Easy Way Out, set in the very near future, outlines how assisted suicide might work in a clinical setting, with all the palaver of hierarchies, line managers and rules. What does it mean to consent to your own annihilation? What effect could such a procedure have on those left behind – not least on the healthcare professionals?

Evan, the narrator, is a cool, functional intermediary between the “oblivious healthy” and the terminally ill. A roving nurse at a large Australian hospital (it could be anywhere), who has witnessed “the full shit-covered mess, from maternity to palliative”, he is taking part in a pilot scheme, entitled Measure 961, in which sick patients can be monitored while they sip a fatal dose of Nembutal. There are safeguards, of course: the patient must be able to clearly articulate their wishes, and to drink unaided; everything is recorded on video.

At the start of the novel, he has just been awarded his first solo “assist”, in the case of Teddy, a 41-year-old builder riddled with skin cancer. Teddy is calm and determined, his wife less so, and the surprise attendance of his three daughters – “Don’t, Dad” – crimps the smooth running of the procedure. A nervous Evan screws up, though Teddy still dies. Surprised to be kept on the programme, he begins to relish the work. After Teddy comes a stream of clients for this apprentice “death doula”.

In his downtime Evan relaxes by pursuing gay threesomes. His regular squeezes are a couple, Lon and Simon, who are getting fonder of him than he is of them as he juices up their love-life: “I participate in their mid-week sex (30 minutes or less; no anal)”. Amsterdam makes Evan intriguingly opaque, his ultimate motives hard to fathom. To what degree his affectlessness is denial, coldness or simply professionalism is mostly kept dark.

His clients, so briefly encountered, are without exception admirable, full of fortitude and a laconic humour. There is Sanford, who has been listening to a chapter of the Tibetan Book of the Dead every day (“It’s provocative”); Iris, who sets up a chanting ritual and focuses on a meaningful painting; and Leo, a 90-year-old Chinese restaurateur who dies in the arms of his elderly girlfriend. They vanish eerily, one minute conversing, the next cooling; an endlessly fascinating magic trick. Evan counts the “I love you”s, assessing their quality, while wondering how his own death scene will eventually play out.

To add to his personal trials, his sparky mother, Viv, a keen online poker player, has Parkinson’s and is deteriorating fast. What will he do when “Kill me now” becomes less a jokey comment and more a command? Many of Evan’s issues converge on his father’s unexplained death when he was a boy, and he is running out of time to get coherent answers.

The practical details of death are movingly rendered and blackly funny (post-mortem flatulence seems to be the norm). Amsterdam’s vision of the future certainly has its bleak aspects (microchips for the elderly, human interactions routinely recorded), but undercutting the chill of a technological mortality is an unfailing compassion and humanity. You might want to find and find and hug a nurse after finishing this thoughtful and ethically nuanced novel.

•The Easy Way Out is published by Riverrun. To order a copy for £10.65 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.